Paradise in Stone: Representations of New World Plants and Animals on Spanish Colonial Churches in the Philippines

Abstract

Trade in the plants and animals of the New World exerted a profound influence on the imaginations of Filipino architects and stonemasons. Eighteenth-century church facades, designed and wrought by Filipino maestros de obras, are distinguished for their elaborate ornamentation and sensuous depictions of the natural world. Scholars have commented on the luxurious and extravagant detailing of the stonework, but have yet to examine the context of commercial exchanges and cultural innovation in which imported trees, fruit, flowers, and animals such as horses were chosen to embellish church walls. Focusing on several examples, notably the baroque, fortress-like church at Miag-ao in Iloilo, the western Visayas, I shall explore the botanical and animal stone imagery as a striking architectural innovation and expressions of local aesthetics, as evidence of local interest in exotic naturalia, and as an ebullient celebration of the flora and fauna that had come to the archipelago from the New World.